


Trick

by BurningTea



Series: Holidays and Occasions [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Child, Halloween, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 06:48:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5119061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/pseuds/BurningTea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dean made Cas dress up for a case on Halloween, he didn't expect to run into a second case with a haunted house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trick

“I don’t see the point in this,” Cas complained, tugging at his outfit and failing to alter the way it sat across his shoulders.

“Yeah, well. Human thing,” Dean said, because he thought he’d spied their target and didn’t have time for a long explanation right now. “Come on.”

He heard Cas trail behind him as he crossed the street, the damp darkness and the road littered with soggy leaves doing nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the crowds of kids flocking about the place. Compared to the happy ghosts and grinning witches, Cas stood out for more than being taller than most of them. Still, there were adults scattered amongst the packs of small forms, some wearing their own outfits. He wondered how many of them had been pushed into it by their offspring, and how many were heading off to parties after. 

“Get a move on, angel,” he said, not even trying to fight the smirk.

A woman nearby glanced at him and frowned. She had no cause to look at him like he’d done something wrong. She was dressed as fucking Umbridge. 

Cas muttered something as he joined Dean on the sidewalk, the glittery wings Dean had insisted he wear already skewed.

“What was that?” Dean asked. If Sam and Cas had wanted him to be mature about this, they should have let him be the one staking out the bar. 

“I said, this is undignified, and these wings are ridiculous,” Cas snapped, but he didn’t tear them off and hurl them into the road, so he couldn’t hate them too much.

“You’re halo’s slipped,” Dean said. He might feel bad about needling Cas, but later, once he’d got the hunt over with and was somewhere warm and not swarming with knee-high potential victims. 

“I am aware,” Cas said, in a tone of voice that suggested he’d missed the literal point that his head-piece was at as much of an angle as his wings. 

“No… You know what? Never mind. Just keep up.”

This time, Dean got a good look at the guy in the dark robes and swore, pulling to halt. It wasn’t their guy. Sam’s phone buzzed a few seconds later, telling Dean that not only was he the one out in the dark and the damp and the dreadful costumes, but Sam had also lucked out and found their target. 

“What is it?” Cas asked.

Dean glanced up and felt that at least this made up for something. Cas looked grumpy and white. Very white. The long robe Dean had made him put on came down to his ankles, some sort of shimmering coating on it making it seem whiter than it should do under the inadequate street-lights. The wings were white, the halo was white. 

“Sam’s got it.”

“Oh.” Cas tilted his head, his halo almost taking a dive off his head. “Does that mean we’re done?”

The ‘Can I get out of these stupid clothes?’ was heavily implied, for all it was unspoken. 

“Yeah,” Dean said, answering both questions.

Cas made to get out of the robe right then and there on the street, but Dean had made him strip down to his undershirt to wear the thing and there were still a load of kids around.

“Hang on. You can do that back at the car.”

Cas scowled but dropped his arms, huffing. He walked beside Dean as they headed back to the side-street where they’d left the Impala. Dean could practically feel the irritation coming off the guy in waves. Now that the monster was caught and Dean knew none of the kids around him were going to get their tiny throats ripped out, a squirming feeling of guilt wriggled and grew under his sternum. Maybe it had been cruel to dress Cas up as an angel. Still, he wasn’t about to admit it right now. He’d get Cas changed and go meet Sam at the bar. A couple of drinks would sooth Cas, if only because he went all gooey whenever he felt something nice had been done for him. As long as you could get him to notice.

They were nearing a house lit up with strings of fairy-lights when a scream split the night. It was so cliche that Dean almost dismissed it as part of someone’s Halloween soundtrack. The second scream had too much terror in it to be faked.

Cas took off before Dean did, not anywhere near as hindered by the long skirts of the robe as he should have been. Maybe he really did have practice wearing one. 

Dean overtook Cas before they reached the front door. It hung open, spilling cheery light into the night. A guy held a beer bottle frozen partway to his lips, staring in at the hallway as though trying to decide which was to run.

“What’s going on?” Dean snapped, pulling to a halt a foot away. 

He felt Cas’ hand touch down on his back for a moment, probably steadying himself as he stopped, but he kept his attention on the guy. 

“No idea,” the guy said, “Do you think we should go and check it out?”

“No chance it’s part of this whole get up?” Dean asked, even though he was mostly convinced that scream had been real.

The guy shook his head.

“God, no. This is Stella’s ‘escape from Halloween’ party. Anyone putting on some screaming thing would be thrown out through a window, and our guests aren’t here yet, anyway.”

The pause had given Dean enough of a chance to ground himself that the third scream had him tearing inside and up the stairs before beer-guy could add anything else. The second pair of footsteps would be Cas.

He barreled to the last door in the hallway, where the tail-end of the scream was turning to whimpers. 

“Got your blade?” he hissed.

He flicked a glance at Cas, who held up the silver sword with a casualness due to even more training than Dean had been through. Even with the halo and wings, Cas looked dangerous.

Dean went in first, because knowing Cas was more deadly than most of the things they’d ever hunted wasn’t enough to wipe out the memories of Cas hurt, of Cas unconscious. Dean had tried to stop Cas coming on this hunt at all.

Inside the room, nothing looked out of place. The bedspread was screwed up into a ball in the middle of the mattress, but that was hardly a sign of monster activity. 

“Anything?” Dean asked, voice tense.

“Maybe…”

Cas stalked across the room, that robe swaying, and reached out for the closet door. Dean almost called out to stop him, to let Dean check it out, but the door was open too fast. A strangled cry from inside had Dean at Cas’ elbow in moments. 

Together, they peered down at a woman in a red top and jeans, dark hair tied back in a braid and some sort of sparkly gold eye make-up on. She looked pale and shaken. Actually, she looked fucking terrified.

“Don’t be afraid,” Cas said. He crouched, bringing his face to her level, and the small whimpers she was clearly trying to silence dried up completely. Probably caught sight of his eyes. They had that effect on Dean sometimes. “What’s your name?”

At Cas’ soft question, she swallowed and held out her hands, fingers splayed as though not sure she’d land on anything solid, and patted at Cas. One hand landed on what was probably his knee and the other one stopped just shy of his cheek.

“Are you…are you real?” she asked. She hadn’t looked at Dean yet. “Are you an angel?”

She breathed out that last word, the fear drenching her at odds with the hope dawning on her face.

“Yes,” Cas said, because he was still awful at remembering to lie. “What attacked you?”

That broke her out of her near-frozen state and she burst into movement, flinging herself at Cas, who rocked slightly as she wrapped her arms around his neck. To his credit, Cas didn’t push her away. He hesitated, then rubbed a hand slowly up and down her back. All that seemed to do was let the tears out, and she sobbed into his neck.

Dean took the chance to open the other closet door and poke around, but there wasn’t anything in there. He was just about to give up when a noise behind him had him whipping round, gun at the ready, in time see beer-guy drop his bottle on the carpet.

“What the fuck?” beer guy said. Well, more like wailed. “What are you playing at?”

“Something scared her,” Dean said. “If it wasn’t you, then get out.”

Cas rose next to him, the woman, Stella probably, still held firmly in his arms. She still had her nose buried in Cas’ neck, something he didn’t seem overly concerned by, and her hands rucked up the white fabric of the robe.

“Do you know what frightened Stella?” Cas asked, with that laser focus he got sometimes. 

“No. No, I swear. I was just outside, having a beer, waiting for our guests, and then there was screaming, and you turned up, and I thought, shouldn’t leave my girlfriend in the house with two strange men-”

“But you could leave her in the house when she was screaming?” Cas asked, that low, dark tone a warning. “You could wait to come up to check that she was all right once the two ‘strange men’ were in the house?”

Dean set his free hand on Cas’ shoulder and tried for a calm, reasoned tone. 

“Let them sort it out later, Cas,” he said. “We still need to find whatever scared her.”

That question was answered a split second later, when something dark and spiky erupted out of a shadow up near the ceiling and launched itself right at Dean’s face.

He pushed Cas aside and fired, hitting it solid three times before it knocked him off his feet. He rolled and landed on his knees, glancing at Cas…at where Cas had been standing. 

No Cas.

“Cas?” 

Stella was still there. Stella was gaping at the empty space where Cas had been. Gun still at the ready, Dean rose and went to her, checking everywhere he could to see where Cas had fallen. 

“Where’d he go?” Dean asked Stella, but she just shook her head.

Beer-guy made a choked noise and Stella threw herself across the room to him, bundling him out of the room and down the hallway. Dean let them go. He scouted the room, but there was empty floor on the other side of the bed, nothing but a couple of boxes under the bed, and the closet Stella had been in was empty. 

“Cas?” he yelled, but only silence answered him.

Giving up on the room, Dean headed after Stella and her useless boyfriend, knocking open doors and searching as he went. He found the two of them out in the front yard, huddled together under a twisted old tree by the fence. Stella looked calmer, but in that way that said parts of her brain had decided to take a break. Beer-guy mostly looked annoyed.

“What are we meant to do now?” he demanded as soon as Dean drew close enough to hear his hiss through the damp air. “We’ve got guests turning up soon.”

“Party’s over,” Dean snapped. “You two better start talking. What exactly just stole Cas? Details!”

Stella looked up at him, the gold around her eyes making her look slightly inhuman. 

“Cas?” she said. “The angel was called Cas?”

“Is called Cas,” Dean corrected. “And I need something to work with, here, so spill. What’ve you seen? Heard? Any smells?”

“I was getting changed,” Stella said, as though speaking by rote rather than describing something which had happened to her, “and that thing flew at me. It chased me into the closet and I hid. Then the angel came.”

“Nothing before that? No earlier signs?”

As she shook her head, and beer-guy set his jaw stubbornly like Dean was being the difficult one, Dean pulled out his phone and called Sam. It only rang once before his brother picked up, the raucous noises of a bar-party in full swing coming clear and true down the line. Sam’s voice yelled something, but it was impossible to tell what, and a few seconds later the noise muted.

“That’s better,” Sam said. “Can barely think in there.” He sounded almost jubilant. “Where are you guys? I was going to buy you both a drink.”

“You’ll have to do that later,” Dean said. “Cas is missing. Something’s taken him.”

The upbeat tone to Sam’s voice was gone when he spoke again, his tone now serious as the grave.

“What? When? What do you need me to do?”

By the time Dean finished a terse recount of events, Sam had left the bar and was half-way through breaking into the now-dead monster’s car. He hung up with a brief promise to be there as soon as he could be, and Dean turned back to the house. The fairy-lights twinkled. 

“There has to be more you can tell me,” Dean said. “That thing can’t have just appeared out of nothing.”

A hand on his arm made him twitch, and he had to stop himself from batting Stella away.

“Is he your angel?” Stella asked. Some of the vagueness was already fading from her face, replaced with a shrewd look that gave a whole different vibe to the question. 

“We need to get Cas back,” Dean said. “It doesn’t matter who he belongs to.”

He should have said that Cas belonged to Cas, of course, but…

Stella, seemingly over some of her panic now she wasn’t trapped in a room with whatever that was, softened. She looked at Dean with something too close to pity, but he didn’t shake her off. 

“I don’t remember anything,” she said. “Not really. We… I lost my rabbit last week. You don’t think…?”

“That it’s the ghost of your bunny?” Dean asked. “Yeah, no. Not something I’ve come across before, anyway.”

She shrugged and patted his arm, casting a quick look over at her house and biting her lip. Her whole stance screamed that she might be feeling okay out here, but she had no intention of going back inside.

Any further conversation was cut short by a loud voice asking what the fuck they were doing out in the garden, and had the party been moved out into nature? Beer-guy threw his arms out and started in on some story about how he’d saved Stella from an actual ghost, but now the house was haunted and they couldn’t go back in unless they wanted to be torn to pieces. The man who’d asked the question, who turned out to be almost six foot and wearing a silver jacket, nodded and smirked, sharing an eye-roll with a tall, thick-set woman wearing a purple dress.

Dean kept quiet while the small crowd of people in party clothes carried out what they clearly thought was a tongue-in-cheek conversation that ended up with the party being moved to a bar on the other side of town. Stella cast a few looks at Dean but didn’t interrupt. She’d perhaps had the same thought that Dean’d had, that letting people think Stella had just failed to get the decorations and snacks sorted was a small price to pay for keeping people out of the blast zone. Even so, she bristled a few times when beer-guy, who answered to Dave a couple of times, implied Stella had dropped the ball on preparations because she’d been fussing over her outfit. 

 

“All right. Let’s get rolling,” Dean said when he’d had enough, ushering people away with wide sweeps of his arms. 

Even Dave drifted away without protest, but when Dean turned back to the house he found Stella still under the tree.

“You not going to your party?” he asked. He really didn’t need a civilian around to worry about.

Shaking her head, Stella gave him a small smile. It was weak, almost a ghost of a smile, but it was still a smile.

“I don’t feel in the party mood anymore. I want to help you get your angel back.”

Dean was stopped from telling her she wasn’t likely to be any help by the rumble and sputter of an out of tune engine. A white truck pulled up, the engine died, and Sam swung out, his expression tight.

“Dean,” he called, as though Dean could have missed him.

Stella took a step back until she must have her back to the tree, and just nodded when Dean threw out a lightning fast introduction. Sam had his phone out and was demanding any details almost as soon as he drew to a halt next to his brother, but he didn’t have much to go on.

“I’ve got nothing. You been back in yet?”

Dean shook his head and hefted his gun.

“No, but no time like the present, right?”

They left Stella by the tree and approached the house, Dean with an EMF reader in hand. Relying on cold spots for warning on a chilly night like this was unwise. There was nothing on the first floor. No ghost, no creature of any kind, and no Cas.

It was on the landing of the second floor that it got strange.

The lights flickered and buzzed. There was nothing on Dean’s reader, but that didn’t always mean anything. He felt Sam’s back press against his shoulder-blades as he scanned the stretch of hallway to Stella’s bedroom, and blinked as a haze appeared, almost a mist, a foot or so in front of the door to that room.

It was something white, indistinct, and tall.

“Sam,” Dean said. 

He had to move to one side so that Sam could get a good look. It got more solid, but not much. There was something near the top, something slanted and-

“No!”

Dean chopped at Sam’s hand as his brother aimed the gun, sending the shot firing at the floor, and gripped at Sam’s wrist to stop him trying again. Sam didn’t need to say anything for Dean to know he needed to explain.

“It’s Cas,” he said. 

“It’s a white blob with something on its head,” Sam said, sounding impatient.

“Yeah. I made him wear an angel costume.”

Come to think of it, that didn’t seem funny at all anymore. Dean’s own outfit was pretty much his Fed suit, and when Cas had complained he’d told him he was one of the MIB. Sunglasses weren’t douchey at night if you were being Will Smith. Cas had grumbled himself into silence about it, but Dean had only swerved into the costume shop after Sam had claimed bar duty and sent them away, so of course he didn’t know, and…

“I know,” Dean said, because Sam’s disapproving glare was enough when they didn’t have a Cas in front of them who was trapped in some half-state of existence. “Yell at me later. How do we sort this?”

Whatever Sam was going to say was cut short by the same screeching as before, and this time the spiky thing caught Sam’s hair on the way past, dragging handfuls of it along and making Sam yell in pain, clutching at his head. The thing stopped near Cas, just long enough for Dean to see it roil and coalesce like oil in the air, and then it flew at Dean.

This time, the white figure of Cas followed it, reaching up and grabbing inches from Dean’s face. The dark thing stopped, screeched again, and rippled. Cas and the creature existed in the same space, Cas glowing white and the attacking oil-monster sucking in the light. Lights flickered and smashed, leaving Dean and Sam covering their heads to avoid any stray glass, and the whole floor shook.

It passed.

Lowering his arms, Dean stood to his full height to see Cas frowning down at something on the ground at his feet. No. Someone. A child.

“Cas?” Dean rasped.

Cas glanced at him and away, crouching almost like he had with Stella and setting a hand on the child’s shoulder. The kid unwrapped its arms from around its knees and looked up at Cas, a mutinous, frightened look on its face.

“It’s all right,” Cas said. “You aren’t in trouble.”

“It’s a little bit in trouble,” Dean protested. “What is it?”

“Currently, a child,” Cas said, as though that answered anything, and he hoisted the kid into his arms and stood up. The kid wore a dark robe a bit like the one Cas had. “Did you get the owners out of the house safely?”

“Yeah. Guy’s a dick. He’s gone off drinking. Stella’s out front. She, er, she wanted to stay and help find you, but…”

“That was sweet of her,” Cas said, somewhat absently. He brushed the kid’s hair back from its face, where it fell in thick tufts of dark brown. “Did she recently lose a rabbit?”

Sam took a turn at trying to catch up, running a hand through his hair to neaten it and stepping closer to the kid. A girl, Dean saw. 

“What’s a rabbit got to do with it, Cas?” Sam asked. He sounded a little like he thought Cas was drunk or had taken another spill into the head-space he’d been in after taking Sam’s pain.

“This small one followed the spirit of a rabbit, but the rabbit left and it got stuck here. Young Reapers shouldn’t be left to work these things out for themselves.” Now Cas sounded disapproving, as though Reaper child-care should be better organized, which…what?

“That’s a Reaper?” Dean asked. “I thought Reaper’s were a kind of angel. You guys don’t have kids.”

“Reapers are angels from your perspective,” Cas said, which answered nothing. “They do have offspring, though rarely. Reapers have a tendency to pass on after a while, when the weight of carrying souls become too much. Eventually, they take the journey themselves. In any case, they reproduce. I can only imagine the Fall cut this one loose from its parent.”

“And how do we reconnect them?” Sam asked, because that was Sam, all on board with being angel child-services.

“We don’t,” Cas said. “Any parent would have been searching for this one. They must have been lost in recent events.” 

That usual edge of guilt was there, but not as finely tuned as normal. His attention was still mostly on the child. 

With nothing else to do, they made their way back outside, finding Stella standing under the tree with her phone out. She called out in relief at seeing Cas and ran to them.

“I was going to call the police,” she said, even though she couldn’t possibly have thought that would help. “You found him. I’m so glad. Is…is that creature still in there?”

“No,” Dean said, because it was true and because he didn’t know how to explain what had just happened. “All monster free.”

“Oh, thank God,” she said, and hugged each one of them. She didn’t seem to question why Cas suddenly had a child.

Shortly, Stella was gone, off to find her dick of a boyfriend and their party, and Dean turned to the others. Cas still had hold of the kid, who looked to be about toddler age. Maybe slightly older. Not like Dean was an expert. When Sammy had been that age, Dean had been too young to really know what was typical. 

“Tell me you have a plan for that kid, Cas,” he said.

Cas looked at the child, in her dark robes, down at himself in his white ones, and raised an eyebrow.

“It’s Halloween,” he said. “And we have acquired a child. I believe the logical next step is to go trick-or-treating.”

And he sailed off out of the gate without giving Dean a chance to say anything.

**Author's Note:**

> This was an attempt at a one-shot, only now I think it may need more. However, I have a lot of fics on the go as it is, so let's call this a one-shot opening chapter or something and come back to it later. The issue of the Reapers is one which needs sorting.


End file.
